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The fifth in Frances Brody's Kate Shackleton mysteries, MURDER ON A SUMMER'S DAY is once again set in post-WWI Yorkshire. This time, the India Office, in the form of Kate's cousin James, calls Kate for assistance when the Maharajah Narayan, a visiting Indian prince, goes missing from the Duke of Devonshire's Bolton Abbey estate. The missing-person case quickly turns into a murder case when Kate discovers Narayan's body. Because Narayan was traveling with his English mistress, whom he planned to marry against the wishes of a number of people, as well as with a magnificent diamond, and because of England's uneasy presence in India, intrigue, cover-ups, and suspects abound. Soon, other members of the Indian royalty fall prey to poisoning, a young villager is drowned, and the priceless diamond disappears, leading James on a chase that takes him to India and Kate on a quest to find a killer before he kills Narayan's young son.
As in the earlier books in the Kate Shackleton series, Brody deftly inserts just the right amount of period detail wiothin the story threads and clues, giving the action a nice flavor of the times. In MURDER ON A SUMMER'S DAY, Brody also continues to show the real obstacles Kate faces simply because she is a woman. In this novel, Kate calls in her assistant Sykes to work undercover because the gossip and clues seem to travel primarily among men, none of whom see Kate as entirely capable of understanding the issues or solving the case. In spite of those obstacles, Kate tromps through fields in her Cuban heels, witnesses the spectacle of a royal Indian entourage, and stands her ground--mostly--against the political forces at play as she works to uncover the truth. It is those political forces, as well as Kate's struggles, that Brody relies on in this installment to add further depth to the story. Brody touches upon the uneasy hold England has in India as well as the growing unrest there--both between the English and the Indians and among the Indian princes themselves. But Brody uses both the issues of inequality and the political issues to color the tale with realism and authenticity, making the times and the setting more believable but never taking anything away from the fact that this is, in the end, a good murder mystery, not a political diatribe.
Overall, Brody packs a lot into 400 pages, taking the reader down side trails of subplots and filling in events that range from the birth of a baby to the opening of a tunnel, but none of it feels like "filler." Each red herring and side story is interesting, the pace is fairly quick, and the solution is a surprise but doesn't feel contrived or coincidental. A few of the incidents seem a bit unlikely but that's easily forgiven. Readers who are already Kate Shackleton fans are sure to find more to like; those who are new to the series will have no trouble beginning here.
§ Meredith Frazier, a writer with a background in English literature, lives in Dallas, Texas
Reviewed by Meredith Frazier, February 2016
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